the 11 yr old
still feeding from the source in Denny’s. Happy, all of us sucklings swimmingin the matrix, our ongoing alma mater so to speak. How does this jovial word “suck” loseit’s genial connotation and become
pejorative?

Daughter. .
Oh, Daddy: you know. Nature abhors
a vacuum.

Daughter:
But we’ve drifted off topic, as usual—fooling
with the words instead of paying attention to sentences. How come this
course sucks?.

Father:
Well, as I said: all my courses suck inthe sense that that they don’t maintain the standard chaos-filters of
task and purpose and covering ground and getting some WHERE that shape &edit the normalrandom-to-orderratios for nailing

down what’s useful & what’s
useless, what’stimely and what’s a waste, what you got to do for a decent grade etc:
what you

can call clarity, consistence,
&coherence.

Without standards like these (that the
players can accept or reject) the whole deal pretty muchsucks, yes?

Daughter:
Isn’t this when you start flashing yourarrow
of purpose and mandala ofall-at-once-nesstoprovide visual-aid accentuating the differencethat makes a difference betweenthe values ofaim, purpose, &goal, on the one hand and the values of
constellation of possibility (potency:power) on the other
hand; and how obvious it is that they can’t Just Get Along: arrowand mandala.Any fool can see that.

POTENTIAL (POWER: Potency)

PURPOSE (impotence)

Father: Yes: And PURPOSE (“impotency”)is our dominant
paradigm. “Power” literally means posse: possibility; potential. A potentate
has the power. When he USES it: it’s an impotency. The same waya WORD (like “power” say) has infinite potential. Drop it into a sentence and
it’s confined to a specific syntax and purpose and loses its Potency and

becomes (as it were) IMPOTENT.

Daughter: It
depends on which LEVEL of logical typeyou are operating on Daddy. Most would
say a Word gains power in a sentence—not
impotency.

Father: Sure
most would. That’s the Common Sense. I’m not knocking the Common Sense: it
rules. Dominates. The Arrow of Purpose
Uber Alles —eclipsing if not occluding all the REST that’s possible and potent.

Look: if I’m determined to drive to San Francisco, Duluth is an
impossibility.

Daughter:
Not a logical impossibility, Daddy.

Father: No,
an illogical impossibility, which may be more impossible than a logical one.
“Logic and Sermons never convince,” says Walt Whitman. We’re going toSan Francisco. I’ve made
up my mind.

Daughter: No
wonder some guys have commitment phobia.
Sucks all thepossibilities out in
committing to a specific choice,
aim, purpose, goal.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@;

Daughter: Is
that why your courses suck, Daddy?

Father: No.
They suck in the Common Sense.Possibilities over whelm: too much potency and
power.damnit. Chaos invited in on a
daily basis. No clear task.No forced gun-to-the-head No filters dictating good
& evil,

right or wrong, A;s from B's from C's from D's. That sucks.

Daughter: Or
is that sucking in the Uncommon Sense creating a vacuum by annihilating the
agenda. Lower purpose abandoned for the higher Purpose of Having-No-Purpose:
that’s got to suck big time—hap-ily or un-hapily: depending on how ANYONE
frames it.

Father: “suck” as in
nurture (feminine: felix, felicitas); “suck” as in vacuum:
exhausting the insides of some system—physical or psychical. clean sweep,
nirvana (literally: blows, ventilate). Descriptively: that’s what suck
does. Add on yr judgment—whether you
like it or not and it becomes complicated.

THIS COURSE SUCKS- yes, it
does in fact. (describe mode).

Yea or Boo? (assess mode: love it/hate it)
That’s a course of

another color.

Daughter:
But Daddy, I don’t think you’re explaining WHY :

why do your courses suck? And

sometimes your classes? And

maybe even a particular real-time

class-going-on-in-the Be Here Now.
Sucks.

Father: You
want an Explanation? An Interpretation?

A Reason-Why? a Because & Affect? A
blamation. Scapegoat that will stand for
CAUSE, and address clearly the
Difference between SUCK/NOT SUCK on the

one hand, and then on the other hand apply it to

Courses &

Classes in general &a class-in-real-time specifically

so that you can understand—and maybe
regulate—thelevels and instances of suck-itude: suck sucking suck-fullyin
describe mode (aesthetics) as well as in assess mode (ethic)?

Daughter,
Yes, please. I want to know why and how.

Father: Suck
on the one hand; Not Suck on the other. You’d think it’d be as easy as
describing on and off, open and closed. Pregnant and Not.

Linguistics and Information
theorists have a beautifultrick they play for determining MEANING (significance)which
they define as a difference
that makes a Difference.

Daughter:
Stupid definition: Meaning is sunsets andmockingbirds and ice cream and hugs
and all the stuff we want and live for, stuff that does not suck in the pejorative sense: good stuff that makes life meaningful.

Father: So if something sucks, it’s got no meaning?.

You break a leg and that’s not significant? Meaning full?

Only positive,
smiley-face, not-sucking stuff has meaning for you?

Daughter:
You’re playing games again, Daddy. You
know what I mean.

Father: hmmm
– I know what you mean about the meaning

of meaning. And I’m just quibbling to make meaning mean

more (or less) than just

Yeah I know
what you mean right now

in
real-time: we’re getting along,

covering ground, building up some

conversational velocity,

say: and now I’m being a jerk and messing with themeaning of
meaning; it’s like throwing a monkey wrench into the converse-action machine.

Daughter:
what you talking bout? Daddy.

Father:
Never mind. You say tomato, I say tomahtoe:there's a difference that don't
make a difference, true? You say bit
and I say bet; I say bitter
and you say better:differences that make a difference. Semantic significancecarried in the physical difference between a high-frontalvowel /i/ and a mid-frontal vowel /e/.

Linguists call this Minimal
Pairing: isolate a singledifference in two systems that are
otherwise the same:. /set/sit can/kin sap/sip eating bread & grape
juice /consuming the body of christ; boxing/fighting...Etc.

The single difference is the
difference which makes the difference between the two systems. Hence: meaningful. Significant.

So there's a difference between
a difference that doesn't make a
difference, and a difference does make a difference.

3
different kinds of difference—yes?

Daughter:
that's a lot of difference in the word
difference, Daddy. And you are using the same word to carry radically “different” differences of meaning.

Isn't that a problem--when you define
something in terms of itself, alling meaning a meaning in terms of a
differencethat makes a difference? Loopy? Circular?

Father: It's
called a tautology—a rose is a rose is a rose,said Gertrude Stein. I couldn't
sleep last night becauseof “dormitive dysfunction” (sleep disorder) . Tautology:defines something in it's own terms,
or variation of the same term disguised so as to sound significant:

These are diagnoses and
explanations and because-alities that add no information but sound as if they do. Sort oflike PLACEBO's We are tricked
into thinking a significant significance when in fact there is only a
significance thatdoesn't have any
significance (except in the :mind.)

Daughter:
What's a placebo, Daddy?

Father,
Well, literally it means I PLEASE in Latin, and it's the first word of the Last Rites in the Catholic ceremony for the dying. :I please the Lord in

the Land of the Living.

But in medical science a
placebo is an empty pill—one that has no potency or use or curative quality: a
sugar pill, say. But if you take one under doctor's orders—and assume it will
heal you, it can.

Daughter:
How?

Father:
Tricks the Conscious mind. Conscious Mind thinks it will help—so IT does. Showing what mindcan do over body if it
THINKS it's being rationaland scientific.

Daughter: you
mean Mind, if it doesn't KNOW it'sminding-over-matter, can actually mind-over-
matter, but if it does know it: it can't? .

Father. Yes.
Unconscious Mind is able to do stuff Conscious Mind can't. I'm not even going to try and untangle THAT for now. You can, and bring it up inpsychology class. Or better:
just think about it yourown self. Here, take this pill—blue or red makes no never mind. Now THINK.

Daughter:
how did we get from why does this course suck to differences that do and don't make a
difference,tautological definition and placebo?

Father:
that's the nature of live, unscripted conversation:it wanders, it wonders (Note: a minimal pair: /o/
/a/ is thedifference that makes a difference between wonderingand wandering.).

Live converse constellates as
opposed to arrow-of-purposemove-on-down- the road & get some WHERE: dead
and deadly..

Both kinds of conversation
suck in the pejorative sensebut also in the descriptive sense. If you're a practical
myn of purpose, “live” converse feels like spiraling up your ownrear end.Sucks. If you prefer loose play and open-ended inquiry: on-task talk feels like
necrophiladelphia. Sucks

Daughter:
well why can't the 2 Just Get Along.?

Father:
Exactly. It sucks that they can't. If we aimed a gunat them: would that do it? My courses, by the way, areexactly like all the other courses: syllabi , textualassignments, papers to write, class meetings nd
discussion, journals, in some cases final exam.

A Course is a Course is a
Course: all the same: me and John Brock, and David Bradshaw, Katherine
Burleson, Ali Climo: yes? Need we argue? more same than difference.

There's one difference,
however, that separates my coursefrom all the other courses.A difference that really makes a difference. A significant difference and might be the reason
why,the explanation, the
interpretation,,the because& affect,, the scapegoat,, the
blamation that generates the suck-i-tude in all my courses.

Daughter:
Tell me why, Daddy; T That's what I asked in the first place.

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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by athief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow,squeezing off a couple of rounds and sendingthe burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons offamily notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down toPhiladelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him.She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-itwould have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY butINSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville